Nature & Animals Quote by William Blake

Ambition, Blake suggests, only becomes dangerous when it’s borrowed. “No bird soars too high if he soars with his own wings” reads like a proverb, but its bite is aimed at a culture of secondhand authority: inherited theology, social rank, fashionable opinion. In Blake’s universe, the real sin isn’t reaching too far; it’s mistaking someone else’s reach for your own.

The line works because it smuggles a radical ethic into a natural image. A bird doesn’t “deserve” flight; it flies because flight is what it is. Blake’s insistence on “his own wings” turns authenticity into a moral technology: what legitimizes ascent is not caution, permission, or pedigree, but inner capacity. The warning is implicit. Soaring on borrowed wings - living by imitation, obedience, or institutional scripts - is the fall. Not failure, but self-estrangement.

Context matters: Blake wrote as an anti-establishment visionary in an age of industrial discipline and political reaction, when imagination was being fenced in by both factory logic and respectable religion. His poetry keeps staging a fight between “innocence” (uncoerced perception) and “experience” (systems that train you to doubt your own vision). This sentence is a compact manifesto from that battlefront: transcendence isn’t escapism; it’s self-possession.

It also slyly reframes “too high,” a phrase usually used to police aspiration. Blake declines the policing altogether. The only altitude that condemns you is the one you didn’t earn from within.